


Volos

by applegnat



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-23
Updated: 2011-05-23
Packaged: 2017-10-19 17:33:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/203377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applegnat/pseuds/applegnat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the island of Volos rises Mount Pelion, where the marriage of Thetis and Peleus took place. Francis Crawford, after a fashion, parts from a friend here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Volos

**Author's Note:**

> Written for rondaview's prompt for a kiss between Lymond and Jerott. Spoilers for Pawn in Frankincense.

The marriage of Thetis and Peleus takes place on Mount Pelion, in the company of centaurs, amidst thousand-year forests of beech, maple and oak. On the holy mountain, the sound of the Mediterranean is audible to divine ears and human even in its high fastnesses. There, where gods and humans meet and love, the invisible dawn stains violet the starlight which runs down in streams through the plane tree groves that surround its deathless places, and pools down by his south-eastern window, leading his footsteps soundlessly away from the convalescent room in the monks' hospital.

 _Whom have ye known die honestly / without the help of a potecary?_ He has to step past their sleeping figures in the room below his. Near his doorway is Marthe, hair spilling amber on her pallet, bundled, in spite of the warmth of the night, in Jerott's good wool cloak. He heard their voices early in the evening, before she walked to the sea; raised briefly in plaint and then dissolving into laughter. Hers silver, redolent of some real warmth; his golden, with a shadowless delight that Francis remembers from their boyhood, but not since.

His love for her fills his soul, and even his shuttered eyes are furled with the imprint of it. He lies stretched out on the floor, head pillowed in his arms, remembering her in his sleep.

They might wake. Jerott should wake. _You are adequate to your fate_ , says the Dame de Doubtance mockingly. Francis can recall faintly the piercing regret of the moment, insubstantial now as so many others are, a wisp of memory from the far shore of the precipice he has scaled. But there was a time before memory; a time when they were friends, almost brothers; when the mind and the spirit alike were inclined to love everything good and true and pure about this companion he had always known to like, even to admire.

Jerott has grown older in the last year. There are faint lines around his smile that will always now be there; a frown that arranges itself between the eagle-wing brows as some part of his mind strives, preoccupied, with grief he had never thought was his to own. So he has crossed, continent to continent, struggling to understand what had seized his heart in its cold, playful hands and dragged him so far from home ....

Until now. The lock has turned, the key in -- whose hands? Marthe's? And the trail they blazoned together, a lifetime ago (a child's lifetime ago) fades now, even as the sun breathes rose and silver into the bowl of the night, and the way home lies clear and impassable. He will retrace his steps, with Marthe, and go where he has always meant. He will want to know where Francis goes, too, but now, perhaps, only for the sake of a bond he can name. He will think, if never call himself, a brother. A brother in exchange for the hand of a sister.

Francis stands for a moment in the spill of a shadow, springing so lightly from the aquiline profile, the raven curls, the mouth imperious even in its dreaming softness. The women who might have matched him are now both gone; the bane who almost overpowered him lies dead in the seraglio. But in this darkness here, there is nothing to mourn; only a farewell to bid.

He is not strong enough yet to make a promise, or even to hope. So he thinks of moksha, granted to those free of desire, and thinks that they are made, Jerott and he, not to know it yet. You and I, he says silently. You and I will recognise each other again, in a time to come. It was at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus that Eris, in her jealousy, cast an apple among the Olympians. _Kallisti,_ she said, and the war that sprang from that word tore the navel of the world apart. _Kallisti_ ; for the fairest, and none could tell among the ox eyes of Hera, Athene and Aphrodite.

This is a good hour for him. He can bend, careful to cast no shadow, and breathe in, a last time, that smell of sea-salt and summer grass, of the beloved coast of a country towards which he travelled with the forcefulness of a sun, only to slow and linger in the shallows, and then turn away.

It is only soft enough to escape Jerott's uncomfortably acute attention, but it is a farewell. They may meet again, spellbound or no, but never now in this country, where gods marry men.


End file.
